


Differently

by Beth Harker (Beth_Harker)



Category: Newsies (1992)
Genre: Canon Era, Gen, Kloppman POV, Mush is about ten, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-30
Updated: 2017-12-30
Packaged: 2019-09-30 12:23:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17224040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beth_Harker/pseuds/Beth%20Harker
Summary: Mush takes Blink's side.





	Differently

Kloppman took his time rinsing the blood off his hands. There wasn’t much of it, but a drop spilled at three in the morning was a great deal more troublesome than one spilled during the waking hours of the day. His fingers hurt. Kloppman flexed them under the water, feeling the dull, familiar ache in every joint. Then he turned off the tap, wiped his hands on an old towel that smelled of mildew, and trudged of to deal with his next problem.

Nobody was sleeping. It was three in the morning, but not a single solitary soul was sleeping, or even pretending to sleep. Kloppman would say that it sounded like there was a herd of elephants trampling around the boys’ dormitory above, except that elephants didn’t know anywhere near as many curse words as the heartwarming street urchins in Kloppman’s charge. His patient, a big kid that the others called Skinker, had spent the last hour spewing out every foul word he knew, and promising to kill Mush Meyers if Kloppman didn’t do it for him.

Killing ten year olds was illegal. Tearing frail old men out of their beds in the middle of the night was not. Decking other kids in the nose while they slept wasn’t mentioned in the law books at all, but it was a good way for an orphan to loose the privilege of having a roof over their head and a warm bed to sleep in.

Mush was waiting behind the locked door of Kloppman’s office. When Kloppman opened the door, he was sitting in his hands, and Kloppman was tempted to ask him if he was doing it to keep from hitting anyone else. In his years of working at the lodging house, Kloppman had known too many children like Mush, ones who were too little with eyes that were too big, ones that really cared whether or not you liked them. Most of the time Kloppman could ignore Mush, because he wasn’t any trouble at all.

“You wanna tell me what got into you?” Kloppman asked from the doorway. He closed the door hard. At times like this it was good to make a kid jump, but Mush didn’t, just stared back at him steadily.

“Skinker ain’t a good kid,” Mush said.

“From where I’m standing neither are you. You don’t sneak up on people when they’re sleeping and hit ‘em. Let’s get that straight first of all.”

“Are you gonna kick me out?” Mush asked.

“Are you gonna tell me why you done it?” Kloppman pulled up chair. There was nothing like sitting down to make you realize how sick you were of standing. “It ain’t like you,” Kloppman added, almost to remind himself.

“He made Blink throw a chair.”

Kloppman rested his head in his hands. The chair. He’d thought he was done dealing with that damned chair, but apparently not. Maybe as long as Blink lived in the lodging house, he’d be dealing with that chair.

“Well he did,” Mush said, at Kloppman’s exasperated silence.

“Skinker made Blink angry is what he did. You hearing what I say, Mush?”

Mush nodded. “I know he made him angry. He said…”

“Folks can make you angry. It’s up to you what you do with it.”

“It’s…” Mush’s brow furrowed, and he looked down at his lap. He wanted to say something, Kloppman knew. He just needed to work out what. Kloppman decided to let him. “Blink gets really mad when he gets mad, and some of the other boys, they thinks it’s funny. They try to set him going so they can laugh at him, and it ain’t right. Skinker most of all. He don’t let up.”

Kloppman could believe it. Just like there were always Mushes in the lodging house, there were always Blinks and Skinkers. Even as the lodging house changed from year to year as some boys moved on and others moved in, there was something about the main characters that remained the same. As a very young man barely out of his own rough and tumble adolescence, Kloppman had found himself entangled in the boys’ lives and trials, trying to fix their problems and help them succeed in a world where every odd was stacked against them. That had been followed by nearly a decade of throwing out any boy who was difficult, and leaving the others to manage themselves. He’d tried, at varying times in his life, being as strict as a drill sergeant, and being as permissive as a nursery maid. None of these approaches had worked, and none of them had left Kloppman much of anything in the way of peace of mind.

“You gotta understand where you is,” Kloppman told Mush. “I ain’t saying don’t stand up for yourself. I’m saying figure out how to do it without making things worse for you. The other boys got their rules, and their rules is you gotta fight fair. The lodging house has its rules, and those say you don’t get to fight at all.”

“I don’t like fighting no one,” Mush said. He looked down at his hand, closing it into a fist, and then opening it again. “I don’t like hitting nobody neither.”

Kloppman shrugged. Mush’s feelings about fighting weren’t his business, and now wasn’t the time to tell hm that life was a fight.

“Are you going to make Skinker stop being mean to Blink?” Mush asked. His shoulders slumped at the look Kloppman gave him for that. Slowly, Kloppman stood up and opened the door, and Mush followed. He grabbed on to Kloppman’s shirt sleeve.

“Did you mean it when you said I ain’t a good kid?”

“That’s your job to figure out. You wanna be a good kid?”

Mush nodded.

Kloppman sighed. “Go back to bed.”

Mush waited a moment as if he wanted to say something more, but then turned abruptly to go. Kloppman followed him up the creaking steps. If he didn’t get upstairs and remind the boys that fighting wasn’t allowed, they were going to tear each other apart.


End file.
